6 Quotes by Jean Stein

Have you ever noticed a certain type of man who always wants to go along with his wife to pick out her clothes? I've always thought that's because he wants to wear them himself. Truman Capote on Warhol

I'd like to turn on the whole world for just a moment... just for a moment. I'm greedy; I'd like to keep most of it for myself and a few others, a few of my friends... to keep that superlative high, just on the cusp of each day... so that I'd radiate sunshine.

On the way back something very strange happened. I didn't realize I was going to say it, but I said out loud, "I wish I was dead"... the love and the beauty and the ecstasy of the whole experience I'd just gone through were really so alien. I didn't even know the man... it had been a one-night jag... he was married and had children... and I just felt lost. It hardly seemed worth living any more because once again I was alone.

But as Ram Dass once said, you know, if you think you’re enlightened, go spend a weekend with your parents.

Instead of being distressed by the huge moral discrepancy between the myth of Hollywood and its current reality, most of them only saw what already had been fixed in their minds. It was absolutely eerie and sent me right back to The Day of the Locust. The point that Nathanael West made, of course, is that the masses ultimately want to kill and devour, to cannibalize their celebrity gods.

You see, we have all the makings of a real beautiful dictatorship. And what is holding it back is a tradition stemming out of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. That’s it. And if that center doesn’t hold, you will find the sweetest dictatorship you will ever want to look for. Many of them are men of goodwill, and they do not understand the delicacy of liberty, how easily it can be destroyed.